Small Kitchen Help!

special2usaJuly 31, 2014

I am completely stumped on how to make my current kitchen more inviting. I want to take down the wall that separates the kitchen and dinning room, if its not load bearing wall. Thought about solar tubing to bring in more natural light. The floors are NOT real, the cabinets are not real wood. I have updated it with a new fridge and dishwasher but I know there is so much more that needs to be done.

The measurement for the counter top is 88 inches (back wall to napkin holder) + 50 inches for where the cooktop sits. (the child's drum is laying against it)

If the wall is able to come down (between the kitchen and dining room) what flooring would be recommended?

I enjoy entertaining, cooking and baking. The kitchen is where the family spends most of the time and I want a better layout.

Ditto what Mags438 suggested. Grab a sheet of graph paper and draw it up to scale - not where doors are, widths of doors, etc - and then post it. It's really difficult to give you concrete suggestions without measurements. Also, tell us more about you and your family: how many cooks, how many children, ages, how you cook, do you entertain, etc so that we can tailor our suggestions for your needs.

Here is the dinning room adjacent to the kitchen. I would like to take down the wall between the two rooms.

FYI: The double blue lines featured on the perimeter of the drawings are windows.

The family dynamic is that we both love to cook. 2 small children, under the age of 3. I would love a double wall oven, natural light and and eating nook and my husband would love more space for pizza & pasta making. Enjoy having people over so making the kitchen more the focal part of the house would be ideal. Nice large island that could double as a seating area with stools. The kids love to watch their dad cook and help out when they can. A place to keep fresh herbs during the winter months would be nice as well.

I can't reconcile between what I see in the photos and what I see on the layouts. It's not matching.

Looks to me between the photos and layouts you have 2 sets of french doors, 2 standard doors, a couple of windows on outside walls, plus 2 or 3 openings to the rest of the house, and some strangely angled walls?

If you could post everything on one layout, that would make it easier to visualize where everything is.

Raee: Its not a multi-unit. The house has a screen in porched and french doors leading out to the deck.
The doorway between the wall oven and the sink leads to the living room and front of the house. I did think about closing that up.

rmtdoug: I have merged the 2 pictures together, this should clarify things.

Two suggestions special2usa- If you remove the wall seperating the kitchen and dining room, you will probably want to match the flooring in the spaces which would mean taking out your wood in the dining room OR finding a match for it in the kitchen which might prove hard to do, and might be problematic anyway for a household with little ones. I would suggest a large format tile to unify both rooms or a wood look plank tile for ease of care.

You will lose a lot of cabinet space pulling down that wall too... but I can see why you want to do it. It would be great to use that soffit space for extra storage!

To be honest, your breakfast nook is so close to your dining room, it doesn't make any sense as it is to chop that space up into two eating areas. Putting a table there makes your traffic patterns unusable as I see you've pushed your furniture back for ease of egress. That area should really only have one door too. Sorry. The doors are pretty but they make the space awkward to use.

I would like to see the kitchen migrate towards that area, where you have space for cabinetry and venting against the exterior walls and open up a bigger, "dressy/casual" dining area in the interior space. Best wishes on your project.

Thanks for the updated diagram, but there is still something confusing about it. In photo A, it clearly shows a 90 degree corner where the dark table sits in front of the window. In your diagram, that same corner is not a 90 degree corner.